The Big Picture Magazine
It’s rare in the modern Hollywood landscape to see movies that deal with faith in a very direct way. Religious epics were once a staple genre with the American world of movies, but perhaps more than any other genre, they’ve disappeared from popular American filmmaking since their heyday in the 1950s. What remains is a […]
Even after sitting through its underwhelming trailer, I held out hope for Franck Khalfoun’s Night of the Hunted (2023). After all, the French writer-director is responsible for 2012’s Maniac remake, which – through its brutal melding of the arthouse with the grindhouse – may be this century’s best slasher. But his latest is a far […]
“It’s terribly beautiful here,” the priest tells a local woman, describing the landscape of his remote outpost. She agrees, but with an important caveat: “Yes, it’s terrible. And beautiful.” This conversation occurs late in Hlynur Pálmason’s remarkable Godland (2022) and encapsulates the writer-director’s cinematic worldview, one in which horror and grace coexist in unforgiving natural […]
In the closing moments of Ari Aster’s latest ‘elevated horror film’, our beleaguered hero Beau Wasserman (Joaquin Phoenix) is sat in a small motorboat – forcefully moored in a giant pool within a darkened stadium full of all the people he has ever known – having to defend his life against none other than his […]
Leonid was once a legendary smuggler. He could run for miles – supplies strapped to his back – to deliver goods from his Ukrainian town to nearby Romania. But those days are over. He’s just returned home from a work stint in Poland and is now digging a well for the local church. He wants […]
Director Mark Mylod is best known for drama series such as Succession and Game of Thrones, but he breaks out of TV dramas with the horror comedy The Menu (2022). This Golden Globe nominee follows a group of esteemed guests and their haunting experience at one of the world’s most exclusive restaurants. Last minute edition […]
BONES: Any of the pieces of hard whitish tissue making up the skeleton in humans and other vertebrates. AND: Conjunction, used to connect words of the same part of speech, clauses, or sentences, that are to be taken jointly. ALL: Everything – everything under the sun, and, indeed, above and/or beyond the sun, including your […]
Dan Trachtenberg’s Prey (2022) simultaneously pays respect to and gently subverts the 1987 Arnie vehicle to which it is a loose prequel. On the one hand, it grounds the franchise in the simple premise that made John McTiernan’s Predator so effective to begin with: two creatures – one human, one extraterrestrial – going head-to-head in […]
We often associate progress with height – look no further than the post-World War II boom in skyscrapers. In a pre-credits scene from Michelangelo Frammartino’s Il buco (The Hole, 2021), a group of Italian villagers, huddled around a staticky television outside a café, watch footage of a newsman touring one such building. “We are climbing up […]